Oct. 25th News

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Mrs. Healey’s Classroom News (10/25/15)

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What We’ve Been Up To:

Happy Halloween Week! Just a reminder that the Owls will be celebrating Halloween with "Holey" Pumpkin Day this Friday, October 30th. Please send your child in with one, small carving pumpkin by Thursday, Oct. 29th. Please have the top cut (around the stem) and the guts scraped loose (but still intact!). After a day of pumpkin fun, we'll be culminating with our pumpkin lantern lighting. If you'd like to join us on Friday at 1:30 for this special celebration, we'd love to have you!

*Word Study: We continue to move forward with our spelling word sorts. These second graders have been doing a fantastic job following the many routines and procedures of our word study program. Thank you for your efforts at home! To continue the momentum, spelling sorts will be sent home this week, however, there will be no math homework for the holiday week. In addition to the activities associated with our word sorts, our word study time is also spent on grammar concepts. While studying adjectives, students had a great time creating jack-o-lanterns representing different adjectives!! Take a look at their clever creations!

 

*Reading: We jumped right into our second unit of study this week: Becoming Experts! Students learned that to become "experts" on a topic they have to read lots and lots of nonfiction books. We reviewed nonfiction text features (table of contents, glossary, bold words, captions, photographs, diagrams) and shopped for new books. We learned that "just-right" nonfiction books are a little different than "just-right" fiction books, as we can obtain a lot of information from diagrams and photographs in nonfiction texts.

     Our focus for the week included: 

• Nonfiction Readers Grow Knowledge!
• Pay attention to key details
• Put the parts of the text together in your mind
• Ask questions
• Think, what is this book (and this part) teaching me?

 

* Reading Buddies: Thank you for sending in flashlights last week to support our flashlight read! It was SO fun turning off the lights, reading Halloween stories by flashlight! Our fifth grade reading buddies will join us the morning of "Holey" Pumpkin Day to help us with our pumpkin math. We're very lucky to be working with them this year!

 

 

Have a great, last week of October! This year is truly flying by!

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Coming Up:

- Thursday, Oct. 29th: Pumpkins Due
- Friday, Oct.30th: "Holey Pumpkin Day"; join us for our lantern lighting celebration from 1:30-2:00 if you're free!
- Thursday, Nov. 5th: Early Release (first day of conferences; reminder slips will be sent home this week)
- Friday, Nov. 6th: No School, Teacher In-Service Day

Oct. 18th News

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Mrs. Healey’s Classroom News (10/18/15)

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What We’ve Been Up To:
Thank you for your help with collecting, washing, and pressing leaves! We had a BLAST creating our leaf animals this week and can't wait for the finished products to line our halls.

 

 

Reading: We've been making huge strides during reader's workshop as we continue the second grade "reading growth spurt!" Beginning of the year assessments are complete and guiding individual instruction as we move through our units. We spent this week focusing on the reading work we can do as partners. Reading partners help us practice fluency, act as a coach to help figure out tricky words and check our understanding, and (most importantly!) help us "grow talk". Lizzie, Cate, and Lucas (all former Seals!) were doing such great partnership work, they did a "fishbowl" of their conversation and let us all sit in and watch.

After seeing what we noticed (only one person talked at a time, all eyes were on the speaker and their book, asking follow up questions---what was your favorite part? Why did you like that part? What do you think will happen next?), it was time to practice with our own partners. Everyone did such a great job!

We'll be getting new reading partners on Monday as we launch our "Becoming Experts" unit of reading nonfiction. 

Global Read Aloud: This week, as we continued our Global Read Aloud author study, we read Amy Krouse Rosenthal's story Duck! Rabbit!

After enjoying this great story, we took a class poll to see how many students saw a duck in the illustration, and how many saw a rabbit. We graphed the results and noticed that 9 students thought the image was a rabbit and 6 students thought it was a duck. 

Following our graph, we had our first classroom debate. Both sides made some pretty convincing arguments! Ask your child if they saw a duck or a rabbit and why they think so.

                             

In an exciting conclusion to our debate, we learned that the author thought it was a "drabbit" :) This sparked some great conversation and led into our blog response questions for us to write. We discussed: have you ever thought you were right and then realized you were not? When is it ok to disagree? Can we still be friends and have different opinions? Check out some of our responses!

Remember, you can check out all our responses, as well as what our Canadian friends had to say, at our official Global Read Aloud blog.

5th Grade Reading Buddies: Last Tuesday, coming off of Columbus Day weekend, we teamed up with our 5H reading buddies to build a boat! Using only one piece of aluminum foil, partnerships had just five minutes to design a boat that could hold pennies. After the building was complete, we had a "sail-off" to test just how many pennies could be held! Four of our teams made it to 100 pennies and could have kept going! We'll have to challenge those teams to another round in the future. Ask your child what their boat design looked like and how many pennies they were able to hold. (Pictures to come soon!). 

    **We'll be seeing our reading buddies again this coming Wednesday, 10/21 and we'd like to read Halloween stories by flashlight. If you could send in a flashlight for us to borrow for the day (clearly labeled with your child's name!), that would be great! Thank you, as always, for your help in making learning fun!  I'll send home a paper notice on Monday with this information as well.

Math: During our math workshop, we continue to learn and practice our math facts. ANY help you can give with encouraging your child to practice their addition facts (working towards automaticity) would be greatly helpful as we move forward through our year. We've been talking about a TON of strategies that can help us learn our facts, such as:

     -Doubles (4+4 = 8)

     -Doubles +1, and Doubles -1 (4+4=8, so 4+3=7 and 4+5=9)

     -Combinations of 10 (4+6=10)

     -Making 10 (4+6=10, so 4+8=12...make your 10 first, how many left over? add that to your ten)

     -Turn Around Facts (6+3=9 so 3+6=9)

To help with fact fluency, encourage your child to try some of these activities at home:

Math Playground (scroll down to the addition and subtraction section)

Addition Top-It (card came like "war", each person draws two cards and adds them together, the person with the higher sum wins all four cards) Want more of a challenge? Try drawing three or four cards and adding them together!

Fact Dash

IXL (E.12 would be great addition practice for number stories (word problems) which were also practiced this week!)

Have a FANTASTIC, fall week!!

The Global Read Aloud Has Begun!!

2H has begun participating in The Global Read Aloud!

Joining over 525,000 students worldwide, our Owl Class will be studying author Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The Global Read Aloud project encourages classes to participate by reading the shared books and connecting with other students throughout the world!

Our class connection is with the Grade 2 and 3 students of Markham Gateway Public School in Markham, Ontario, Canada! We had SO much fun learning about their school and typical school day (ask your child to tell you some of the similarities and differences!) and are working on creating a venn diagram comparing our two schools.

We kicked off this week by reading Amy KR's book Chopsticks! We read it several times as we got to know Amy as an author (she sure does love wordplay!) and searched for the story's message. After reading the story, we got to answer our first response question and blog to our Canadian friends! You can follow our weekly connections and read our responses on our specific Global Read Aloud blog here.

We'll start our next book, Duck, Rabbit, tomorrow!

Designing our own Chopstick characters and scenarios!

Comparing Amy's book Spoon to Chopsticks

Trying out chopsticks!

We're also trying twitter as a means to make more global connections. If you're on twitter, you can follow our tweets at the twitter handle @authorstudyGRA . We're hoping to hear from our author herself (@missamykr) sometime soon! Rumor has it, our 2R Giraffe neighbors have already been in contact!! Very cool!

Oct. 4th News

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Mrs. Healey’s Classroom News (10/4/15)

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What We’ve Been Up To:

Happy October! It's hard to believe we've already been in school for over one whole month together! Time flies when you're having fun!

*Words Their Way: We've completed our first unit in Words Their Way! Units run in two-week cycles. On the first day of the cycle, the sort is introduced. Students explore and analyze the words to discover patterns and consistencies and to establish rules. The first week of the unit is done completely in class to build independence. The second week of the cycle is when you will see the word sort come home. Practice will now happen in both the classroom and at home and students will be given a "spelling review" on the spelling pattern on Friday. On these reviews, students will be given five words chosen randomly from their sort list, as well as three "challenge" words that were not on the sort list, but do follow the same pattern. The purpose for Friday's review is to determine if students have mastered the spelling pattern and are ready for a new pattern, or if they need some more time on the current pattern. I will share their spelling review booklets with you at parent conferences.

*Reading & Writing Workshop: I am SO impressed by the work these young readers and writers have been doing (did they tell you I was caught bragging about their hard work and some teachers from Hampton came and watched them in action?!) We've nearly finished both of our first units and will be celebrating our hard work as a class this upcoming week. This launching unit focuses a lot on noticing authors' "moves"---techniques an author uses to enhance their story. As readers, this can help because we can stop & think about author intentions, pay close attention to the ending of stories and see how it brings everything together, and we can think about authors' messages. In writing, we can see how published authors use different "moves" and then try them in our own writing!!! We started studying and trying out illustration techniques, but have moved seamlessly into trying "moves" in our written work. Next time you're reading with your child, have them point out "what they notice" about the writing and illustrations---you'll be amazed!!

After scouring our classroom library, some (and really these are just some!) of the "moves" we found were:

• dialogue
• parentheses
• dashes
• detailed descriptions
• bold words, slanted words, changes in size
• motion lines
• speech bubbles, thinking bubbles
• sound effects

Searching for writing moves!

Our wall of "moves" (pink show illustration techniques; green shows writing techniques)

    Next week, we'll be starting two author studies to really dig deep and learn from the masters. We'll be studying Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Kevin Henkes. Stay tuned!

*Science: We've been having a blast studying the work of scientists while exploring magnets! We learned that scientists start with asking a question, they explore & experiment to find answers or discover new information, they record their data, and they share their results!! Ask your child what they've discovered about magnets so far.

What happens when you put two magnets together?

Carefully recording findings.

Do magnets work through different objects?

We'll continue our discovery this week!

*Math: We finished up our first math unit this week and students took their first assessment. After students have made corrections (in colored pencils!), tests will be sent home. Let me know if you have any questions regarding your child's assessment. After testing, we wasted no time at all and jumped right into our second unit which focus on addition and subtraction fact strategies. The parent letter for the unit was sent home one Friday.
To help keep skills sharp, students can visit these sites:
Counting Money
IXL (P.1 Names and values of common coins; P.3 Count money- pennies, nickels, and dimes only; P.4 Count money - up to $1)

1. 
   
   
2. 
   
   

*Read Aloud: Earlier in the week, we finished our first novel, The World According to Humphrey by Betty G. Birney. Read aloud is one of the students’ favorite times of day (and mine as well!) . They come in from lunch and listen intently as each day we get further and further into a wonderful novel. The World According to Humphrey is a story about a hamster who is the classroom pet of room 26. Each weekend he travels home with one of his classmates and learns a little bit about them along the way. Turns out Humphrey is pretty good at problem solving! Humphrey is the main character of many other stories. Friendship According to Humphrey and Surprises According to Humphrey are some of the great books in this series if you’re looking for a read aloud for at home! Many of the Humphrey books are available through Scholastic (October book orders due Friday, Oct. 9th!)

 *Fall Leaf Project: Information about a fall leaf project will be coming home on Monday. Students will be asked to gather 20-30 dried leaves to bring into school. While the leaves are not due for a couple of weeks, it’s a good idea to start keeping an eye out for interesting, unique, bright, or bold leaves as they start to fall.

*October Related Arts Schedule:

Sun	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat
4	5 Library	6 Music	7 PE	8 Maker Space	9 Art	10
11	12 NO SCHOOL	13 PE	14 Library	15 Music	16 PE	17
18	19 Maker Space	20 Art	21 PE	22 Library	23 Music	24
25	26 PE	27 Maker Space	28 Art	29 PE	30 Library	31

Have a great week!!